Request For Information on Building a Blender Desktop Computer:
I am putting together reference material on how to choose components for and build a Blender desktop computer.
There will be 3 levels of computers; entry level, best bang for the buck, moderately priced pro level.
So here is a chance to share your experience and post any tips you have on components, configurations and setups. Please include details like model numbers or brands. In other words don’t just say, “Buy the most expensive processor you can!”
Things that would be helpful are things like –
memory combinations, like are two sticks of half the memory each faster than one stick of all the memory
what mother board/chipset/component matching information you may have researched that reduce bottlenecks
what mother boards and settings work great at increasing speed without causing four foot flames to shoot out from the case
what’s the most reliable SSD drive, what’s the best HDD for fast access times and a smart good cache
what are the best component addon cards to offload CPU based peripherals such as NICs and sound cards
what GPUs work best with Cycles
Thanks and I am looking forward to what the community here can come up with. I will eventually assemble the information into a usable form to share with everyone.
I regretfully have only a suggest on a general setup rather than individual components. I apologise in advance if this information is useless, but I would like to contribute to your effort here all the same. I for one would like to know what others recommend for a Blender-specific machine for the purposes of stability.
For 3D work, my ideal setup would be two computers: One being low-spec for working(modelling, sculpting, animation), the other more high-spec for rendering and heavy physics calculations. The low spec would only require a dual-core processor and 3GB of memory, whilst the high-spec would be at least a quad-core with 4GB memory. There is also the issue of hard-disk size: the low-spec could be as little as 120GB, but as it will be out putting renders the high-spec should be at least 500GB.
Another thing to consider is the number of USB ports. When choosing my Inspiron 1720 laptop years ago, I figured having four USB ports to be overkill, but now I use three input devices: Razor Arctosa Keyboard, Razor Nostromo and a standard MS mouse. Oh, I have a Wacom Bamboo as well, but the pen got lost during removal…which is bloody annoying!:mad: But having plenty of USB ports is a good thing.
I suppose my point is that even with the most perfect PC - even with a dual-monitor setup - its still only able to allow you to do one thing well at a time, a second machine for rendering makes life so much easier. Well, unless of course if you have a machine with multiple processors…
I agree with two PCs, but it could also be a big PC and a render farm, but I disagree your working PC should be less than your render PC. Your working PC should be all about SHORT render times but perhaps without final quality. Assuming a Cycles workflow, you’ll want two or three NVIDIA cards, one for your display and the other as a CUDA device. The best cuda device you can get is the NVIDIA Titan atm. You need a decent second video card for the display so you can sculpt and deal with large assets without slowing down. For this a 3930k intel cpu and at least 16 gigs of ram is your best bet, and then lower end would be an i5 or AMD octa core or some such. For blender your ONLY hope for a render PC is linux. Best case dual xeon e7 to get as many threads as possible. Blender isn’t stable enough on windows for long renders (I personally have proved this again and again since I work in Win7 and render in ubuntu, every now and then I try long renders on the win7 pc and kabloooie… crash 12 hours in or so)
A bit verbose but excellent info SamusDrake and NRK. I always prefer to double or triple geek as we say about using multiple computers. On animation it does help to have your render computer the stronger of the two. You can layer develop on the lesser computer to keep things workable. But if are renderings stills or a critical close up scene in an animation you need those quick renders of the stronger computer for the test output…or have a highly developed workflow between the two computers. I usually have a 3rd computer, my old backup computer rendering out experimental and personal projects…so the 3 computer setup really works best for me.
NRK, that is great info on the long render times in windoze crashing. So a mixed OS solution will need to be expressed. I am working on various dual boot/use configurations such as combination LiveDVD w/HDD mounts and a USB bootable Blender environment to change a windoze computer to a Linux computer for rendering purposes. Hopefully by the end of summer I will have that information posted.
SamusDrake on the smaller HDD, I use that bang for the buck style. You can get an older smaller HDD that has an excellent effective access time <6ms and a great cache on it to where it will scream even though hold less information. That makes the price point really attractive…smaller size with screaming speed versus larger size and slower speed. So a “cheaper” computer is not necessarily the less powerful computer.
Along that lines we are seeing more info on upgrading an older computer with more RAM, SSD and a good GPU to really give a high bang for the buck value.
Great start guys. NRK can you give some more specific information on what makes the Titan so attractive?
Cool thread! I’d like to know what would be the best possible entry-level (but price as the most important factor) PC for Blender and just rendering and special effects in general.
I’ve found PCPartpicker to be good for putting together the best-priced part lists.
[TABLE=“width: 100%”]
[TR]
[TD]Total for all Items:
$355.94
Sales Tax:
$0.00
Grand Total:
$365.51
[/TABLE]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
As you can see, its a very inexpensive build (under $400; £262.50 sterling) for entry level users. I recommend buying a good GPU of your choice, not something that needs crazy cooling though. Remember, there’s only one GPU slot.
Things that would be helpful are things like –
memory combinations, like are two sticks of half the memory each faster than one stick of all the memory
what mother board/chipset/component matching information you may have researched that reduce bottlenecks
what mother boards and settings work great at increasing speed without causing four foot flames to shoot out from the case
what’s the most reliable SSD drive, what’s the best HDD for fast access times and a smart good cache
what are the best component addon cards to offload CPU based peripherals such as NICs and sound cards
From a performance standpoint, none of these make a perceivable difference in general usage and I consider optimizing them a waste of time. Especially concerning SSDs and HDDs, you should consider them all unrealiable and have at least hourly automated backups for everything, preferrably offsite.
Otherwise, I recommend to just compare prices you actually get (which varies from region to region) against the benchmarks that have been made. I also recommend to get a good PSU (hardwaresecrets does good reviews) depending on your needs.
Hmmmmm…at the time putting it there did not seem very attractive…
There is some technical support aspects to it I guess. But the main reasoning for putting it in “news” is this is a hot topic that people want “news” about and the fact that it is being done in a more detailed and usable fashion is “news” IMHO. And that the latest available hardware information is being shared could be considered “news” and that the end product will be announced as “news” when it is done because it will be welcomed good news…
At least that was my thinking, so my vote still goes to news IMHO if others can see it as that more than technical support.
Thanks : )
I’ll check out PCPartpicker…
I’ve used TigerDirect, you gotta watch their rebates, they are infamous for not honoring them. I do like their web interface for parts.
I use NewEgg mostly but their kludgey interface kills brain cells…they do have great reviews.
Also I check Amazon for reviews, they always help on that.
No point for this in animation because of cheap render farms? Hmmm…I am not quite ready to trust the cloud with my source of income…IMHO
Right around $300 for an entry level system? Wow, cool…that works. $300-500 for an entry level system is more than reasonable.
That’s good “news!” ; )
None of my original suggestions “…make a perceivable difference in general usage…” Hmmm…
Well, it seems your experience has not been the same as mine. The points I mentioned typically give my computers a 30% speed and performance advantage over similarly spec’d computers that don’t pay attention to these fine details. These fine details in my experience also reduce lockups and crashes as well as software seems to run smoother. Again, IMHO and experience, other’s may vary. ( =
Backup strategies and PSUs? Oh ya, don’t skimp there…more fine details on those after we get farther along.
Thanks for all the great info peeps, keep it coming. This will be a great reference when it gets compiled and good news to those trying to make educated decisions. : D
I’d like to see some hard evidence to support these claims. How do you even measure this to come up with 30% performance advantage? Differences in RAM speed and motherboard chipsets have never been shown to make such a difference in non-synthetic benchmarks. The days when NICs or soundcards mattered for system performance are long gone, as well. The one area where you might see such gains is different harddrive or SSD models, but then again, that’s only when you’re bottlenecked by file operations. When working in Blender, this doesn’t really affect you much.
These fine details in my experience also reduce lockups and crashes as well as software seems to run smoother.
Well, maybe having spent all this time on optimizing makes you feel better about it, but I wouldn’t construct advice from that. From an engineering standpoint, I can only tell you to optimize what you can measure to make an impact. Otherwise, I might as well recommend homeopathic thermal grease.
It crashes rendering animations, both in cycles and in BI. Talking around 4-6 minutes per frame. I also use other software that is cross platform and ANY operations that use tons of CPU just isn’t stable in windows and works great in linux. Linux is faster for blender anyways, so it’s a no brainer.
I personally have more money than free time, if you have a lot of free time, then forget the titan, but if you have the cash the titan rocks. It’s all about having the resources not to do a ton of compositing and seperate renders if you don’t have to. (not saying you shouldn’t composite at all, some things you just plain can’t do without it, but it’s faster to skip it if you have the hardware) If you look at a simple shot like my avatar where you have a street background and interior lighting adjusting the materials and lighting all in one shot is impossible without really fast hardware or a ton of click … wait … wait… oh that didn’t work… try again… If you’ve got a titan then the feedback is really fast with a ton of assets and you can set up your shot quickly set it to rendering and go do something else.
Just to be wholly honest, I’m using lower end GTX cards atm. I drool over the titan, but am not in a stage of my project that warrants the upgrade right now.
Zalamander, “hard evidence” is a great idea for a thread other than this one. You start it and we can discuss the fine details of distinguishable performance improvements and “hard evidence” there instead of here so this thread doesn’t get derailed or trolled.
Feel free to post the link here since it is such a great tangent topic! It will also help keep this tread on track! Thanks ( :
It is very interesting seeing this topic engage people and ideas. If everybody could help keep this thread focused on the original topic that would be great.
As Bao2 pointed out, this could easily be in technical support talk. So please engage in tech support talk in that forum.
I also need this thread to stay focused on the original topic post so I can aggregate it into a usable “news” item to be posted and shared.
I don’t see how it is off-topic, at all. You ask for advice on what system to build, my advice is to not worry about certain details, because they make no significant performance difference. If you believe that these things matter, you should back this up with data, such as a (non-synthetic) benchmark. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Are we supposed to just collect information based on hearsay and anecdotes?
If so:
I bought an Intel SSD once and it broke after only 5 months, don’t buy Intel!
Some shop clerk told me to not buy Gigabyte mainboards, because they get a lot of RMAs for them.
The Fan of my GTX460 is too loud, don’t buy Gainward.
Everybody knows Linux is more secure and faster and stable, right? Use Linux, then…
Yeah, good point, I really didn’t back up my statement about linux with cold hard facts, so you have a good point. I am a process engineer and the quality guys always nail me for facts so it kind of drives the point home. That being said I really don’t like linux, which is why I only use it for my render PC. I use windows for creating all my scenes. Every once in a while I’ll try and render a scene on my windows machine because I need to reach a production deadline and in 4-5 seperate cases blender has crashed on large scenes. To test this I booted the same machine into linux and it ran for days without issue. I would have loved to file a bug report, but what good would it do. “Load these 100+ linked assets and press render, wait 12 hours and kaboom” I would LOVE to use windows everywhere with blender but every time I’ve been rebuffed. That probably isn’t enough data for you, I’m just giving my experience, you can disbelieve it all you want.
